Dan Ariely on the Truth About Dishonesty, Animated. The Psychology Of Starbucks. Alice G. Walton puts the coffeehouse on the couch: [T]he coffee house plays the central role of “Third Place” in our lives – home being the first and work being the second – and Starbucks has always been vocal about its desire to be this third place for its customer. What’s interesting is that humans actually really need this place, and we’ve needed if for practically our whole existence, according to some. About 20 years ago, Ray Oldenburg, PhD, who wrote a book called The Great Good Place, argued that there are a number of attributes that make a third place a third place: It has to be convenient, inviting, serve something, and have some good regulars (which, he says, is actually more important than having a good host). Recent store renovations seem to discourage sitting for too long: “Changing the business model from third places to speed lane stops will not change the underlying human psychological need,” says Suzanne Roff, PhD, an industrial psychologist.
Studying the Brain Can Help Us Understand Our Unscientific Beliefs. Editors’ Note: Portions of this post appeared in similar form in a December, 2009, piece by Jonah Lehrer for Wired magazine. We regret the duplication of material. Last week, Gallup announced the results of their latest survey on Americans and evolution. The numbers were a stark blow to high-school science teachers everywhere: forty-six per cent of adults said they believed that “God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years.” Only fifteen per cent agreed with the statement that humans had evolved without the guidance of a divine power. What’s most remarkable about these numbers is their stability: these percentages have remained virtually unchanged since Gallup began asking the question, thirty years ago.
In 1982, forty-four per cent of Americans held strictly creationist views, a statistically insignificant difference from 2012. Such poll data raises questions: Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in? Shtulman and colleagues summarize their findings: Study Finds Germans Incapable of Enjoying Life. At a certain point, Sven just lost it. Other members of the discussion group had gone into great detail about how they spent their after-work hours with their companions and enjoyed the end of the day. "That's great for you! " Sven fired back to one speaker. "But first one needs the chance! My boss often plops something on my desk right before it's time to clock out, and when I arrive home late, my wife is pissed off because she was forced to take care of our kid and the housekeeping by herself. " By that point, he adds, all thoughts of a relaxing evening have vanished.
If anything can comfort Sven, it's the fact that he isn't alone with this problem. Whether it's with food, alcohol, vacation or relaxing -- Germans apparently don't have the leisure to enjoy things. Work Before Play The results conform to the image that many Europeans have of Germans in this era of economic crisis as self-denying overachievers who can't even turn off the fun-brakes when vacationing at the beach.
Graphing Jane Austen: Using Science to Extrapolate the Human Condition from Victorian Literature. By Maria Popova What literary Darwinism reveals about universal values. In 1959, C. P. Snow lamented the tragic disconnect between science and the humanities in his famed “two cultures” lecture. In Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning, researchers Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Daniel Kruger, and Jonathan Gottschall — who gave us the fascinating The Storytelling Animal earlier this week — embody Snow’s vision and bridge the gap between science and literary scholarship by borrowing from the evolutionary biology and modern data analytics to construct a model of human nature that explains the evolved psychology of character dynamics in nineteenth-century British novels.
Using the framework of the model, they asked a sample of several hundred readers to give numerical ratings on 2,000 characters from 202 British novels, including all of Jane Austen’s. A few of the findings (PDF) follow, in unnecessarily ugly academic graphics. Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr. Top five regrets of the dying. There was no mention of more sex or bungee jumps. A palliative nurse who has counselled the dying in their last days has revealed the most common regrets we have at the end of our lives. And among the top, from men in particular, is 'I wish I hadn't worked so hard'. Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives.
She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom. Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as witnessed by Ware: 1. "This was the most common regret of all. 2.
"This came from every male patient that I nursed. 3. "Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. 4. 5.